Shaking Up the Ballet

It's a rainy Monday afternoon and Muriel Maffre, a principle dancer for the San Francisco Ballet, is meeting with the most indomitable director she's encountered in her 23 years on stage. This taskmaster is no mere mortal, not even a Balanchine or a Diaghilev, but a true force of nature: Earth.

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Her meeting is at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, where geologist Peggy Hellweg is showing Maffre and half a dozen others a seismograph that records live data from the Hayward fault. "The ground is always moving," Hellweg says, pointing to a needle scratching nervously at a turning paper drum. Tall and limber, Maffre bends to look. "I like things to be a little unpredictable," she responds.

Nevertheless, Maffre will be prepared when Ballet Mori debuts in San Francisco in April, the centennial of the 1906 earthquake. Her solo performance is the latest component of a creative project that's been evolving since the late '90s, when a UC Berkeley engineer and artist named Ken Goldberg started putting live seismological data online. By 1999, Goldberg's work had expanded into a room-sized art installation that included an eerie synth soundtrack programmed by composer Randall Packer. When the piece became a traveling exhibit, it brought a virtual Hayward fault to ­museums in cities as far away as Tokyo.

Then, in early 2005, Goldberg happened to be seated next to Maffre at a dinner party. The dancer mentioned her admiration for environmental artist Robert Smithson, and Goldberg began telling her about what he called his Internet-based earthwork. On impulse, he asked if she'd consider dancing to it. As impulsively, Maffre said yes - and Goldberg's online interface was transformed yet again, this time into an eight-minute ballet.

The first order of business, as with any dance production, was to develop a viable score. "For the installation," Packer recalls, "there was an algorithm that used Earth's activity to modulate sounds of landslides and volcanic eruptions. While the sounds are preprogrammed, their order is totally indeterminate." Yet a ballet isn't like an installation, where people are constantly walking in and out. "You have a beginning and an end," he says. "The piece needed to evolve." His solution was to change the library of sounds minute by minute, controlling the overall structure while leaving the details to chance.

Maffre's performance, choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, will develop in a parallel way. "There will be a vocabulary of moves to go with the vocabulary of sounds," Goldberg explains. "Their order will be decided by what Earth is doing that particular evening."

Back in the lab, someone asks what would happen if the big one were to hit the Bay Area during the ­ballet. Switching seamlessly from artist to engineer, Goldberg says, "There are two possibilities: She'll really have to wing it, or everybody will be running for the door."

Maffre doesn't look fazed. She recalls that an earthquake struck once while she was performing Balanchine. "But I couldn't feel it because I was moving," she says. "I saw people leaving, but what can you do? I kept dancing."

Still, someone else asks, isn't a ballet directed by a seismograph and staged 100 years after San Francisco was decimated tempting fate? Goldberg steps in again. "I think you tempt fate when you try to overpower nature," he says. "I don't want this to seem like some New Age tree-huggy kind of thing, but I'm painfully aware of how vulnerable we are. Our technology is very delicate. The title is from memento mori, 'a reminder of mortality.' This ballet is a reflection on hubris."

Nodding, Maffre taps her foot on the floor. The seismograph is unmoved - at least by her. She strides out into the rain, elated to be working with such an uncompromising director.